The story of the Tomato, Solanum lycopersicum, can help us to understand some of what has happened to agriculture in Wicomico County. In other words, how is it that an area that seems ideally situated for growing tomatoes (as well as other vegetables) finds itself growing corn, soybeans, and chickens instead -except for where we’re now growing strip-malls?

Have you taken a look at the seal of the city of Salisbury lately? On the top right is a tomato, surrounded by a bunch of  strawberries and peaches, a watermelon, a cucumber, a bundle of wheat, and some beans. Notice what is missing – corn, soybeans, chickens, and McMansions (bok choi is absent as well – I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that.  The Salisbury seal dates itself – it was created after vegetable crops had become mainstays of the local economy, and before the rise of the chicken-corn-soybean complex that now dominates the area – somewhere, in other words, between 1925 and 1950 – the period that historians will no doubt call “The Age of Tomatoes.”

The Salisbury seal would not have included tomatoes for much of the 19^th century – most Americans weren’t that interested in the plant except for decorative purposes until after the civil war. A crop native to the Americas (more properly, to South and Central America), tomatoes were only slowly accepted in non-Spanish Europe, partly based on its family connections to the nightshades – a poisonous group of plants already known to Europeans. Even as late as the 1880 agricultural survey of the US Census, there was no category to record the tomato crop; it was not a significant market vegetable, though there is ample evidence that tomatoes were being widely grown in kitchen gardens. This changed dramatically in the next twenty years, and by 1897 the Salisbury paper reported that tomato farmers were playing local canneries and the Baltimore market off against each other, and getting the exorbitant price of $30/ton for tomatoes from Baltimore. By 1920, for the first time the US Census reported that vegetable production (of which tomatoes were the most profitable) had surpassed grains (chiefly corn) in Wicomico County – and in that year, the value of vegetable crops was three times that of cereal crops.  Tomato cultivation grew like, well, tomatoes, and for much of the first half of the twentieth century Wicomico County was one of the largest tomato producing counties in the entire United States, ranking 12^th nationally as late as 1953.

Several things spurred the rise of tomato cultivation in Wicomico County. (1) The region is ideal for tomato cultivation; (2) Urban markets began to demand tomatoes, spurred in part by large-scale immigration from Southern Europe, by growing acceptance by other urban dwellers, and also by the very process of urbanization itself, which made it increasingly difficult for urban dwellers to grow their own vegetables; (3) The arrival of railroads in Delmarva, allowing easy access for fresh vegetables to urban markets, and making Delmarva a key supplier of agricultural goods to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York City; (4) The rise of canning on the Eastern Shore, peaking in Wicomico County in 1919, when there were 37 canneries operating in this county, allowing Wicomico tomatoes to reach a national audience. Canning became so omnipresent that by 1917, the state of Maryland reported that 64,444 acres were devoted to producing tomatoes for canning, and 0 acres were devoted to “table stock.”   

These were the golden years of the Age of Tomatoes in Wicomico County, but it is important to note that by the 1920s the tomatoes were being mass-produced in a similar manner as chickens today – this was not a romantic, C.S.A. sort of past, but the mass production of commercial tomatoes for canning for urban markets. A 1929 report summarizing US agriculture identified Delaware and Eastern Maryland as the “greatest tomato-producing area in the United States, if not the world,” with Maryland growing more acres of tomatoes than any other state in the U.S. (65% more than the next closest competitor), and Delmarva specifically comprising 1/3 of the total US acreage. The New York Times assigned a regular agricultural correspondent to report on Delmarva crops – in fact the Wicomico County tomato crop was reported on by every national newspaper, from the Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times.  By the 1930s, the president of the National Canning Association was based in Wicomico County, and in the 1940s Wicomico County led the nation in the advent of frozen vegetables for urban markets.  During World War II, the Wicomico County tomato harvest was a national concern, with the Washington Post reporting on national efforts by the War Manpower Commission to truck workers to the Eastern Shore. In 1944, downtown Salisbury was silent as dozens of businesses closed so that hundreds of volunteers could rush to the fields and harvest a glut of tomatoes.

But even in the midst of the full flowering of the Age of Tomatoes, there was a rot at the core. In 1923 the US Department of Labor did a study on the child workers of the Eastern Shore, showing that 90% of the school children on the Lower Shore had worked on vegetable farms in the previous year, with more than 20% of these children missing more than six weeks of school. That same study decried the abysmal conditions of migrant workers – the Eastern Shore relied upon an average of 14,000 migrant workers to pick its vegetable harvest each year, in addition to local children. Concern over working conditions would fade during the depression and World War II, but with a return to prosperity, reformers regained some power. In 1951, the federal Commission on Migratory Labor found rampant evidence of abuse of migrants and child labor, in violation of the 1949 Child Labor amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act.  These workers were primarily employed in picking vegetable crops such as tomatoes.  The Commission brought national attention to a recurring problem – and throughout the 1950s a number of journalists visited the Eastern Shore to write about the shameful condition of migrants there (the Eastern Shore was a conveniently close trip from major population centers – and  newspapers – in the big cities of the East Coast).  By the late 1950s, even the local papers had articles about the “migrant problem,” as with one article in the Salisbury Times, entitled “In a Limbo between Civilization and Barbarity, Migrant Workers have no Roots.” These articles focused not just upon the abuse of laborers, but also upon the disruptive effect of migrant laborers upon local communities, fanning fears of STD’s, lawlessness, alcoholism, and even “wetbacks,” in one 1951 Washington Post article. By the 1960s, the federal government began to crack down on child labor and abusive treatment of migrants, even as local citizens agitated to reduce migrant populations in their midst. Many small-scale farmers, faced with criticism, inspections, and higher costs for labor, decided to move to less labor-intensive crops.

At the same time, in 1958, the mechanical tomato harvester was perfected at Michigan State, and field tested in Florida and California, a machine destined to squash the Wicomico County tomato industry like, well, a rotten tomato. This harvester reduced harvesting costs by 55%, but was only economically efficient in huge farm operations.  These farms, many located in sunny fields in places such as California (incidentally, also near large migrant populations), were able to sell high-quality tomatoes at a low price. Local canners began to move their operations south, or to sell out to large multinational corporations that, by the 1980s, had also left Salisbury (including Green Giant and Campbell Soup).  Eastern Shore farmers could not compete.  The average Eastern Shore vegetable farm was too small to benefit from the mechanical harvester (less than 35 acres on average as late as 1930), and labor costs only rose throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.